Bringing Research on Race and Crime Into the 21st Century: Reflections From Over the Years

The sad state of affairs of the economics literature on crime in the 1980s was reflected in a virtual void in the analysis of race. Unlike the criminology and sociology literatures where there was a strong tradition of examining the relationship between race and crime throughout the 20th century, the economics literature was mostly silent on this issue for most of the first 100 years of the American Economic Association, save for a brief foray into scientific racism by some of the founders of the profession (Darity, 1994).

Gary Becker’s seminal contributions to the research on racial discrimination (Becker, 1957, 1971) offered a ripe opportunity for scholars to reflect on the importance of race in economic models of crime. Yet, even in the 1980s, when crime was an important public issue, few economists dared venture into the murky terrain of connecting evidence of discrimination to data on crime. An innovative 1987 issue of the Review of Black Political Economy that I co-edited with Margaret Simms explored contemporary and historical connections between the economics of race and the economics of crime.

In 1970, Black incarceration rates and levels of Black incarceration were but a fraction of what they are today. The drug crisis was beginning to explode, and the significant patterns of residential segregation meant that most of the criminal victimizations in White communities were White-on-White crimes. In contrast, most of the criminal victimizations in Black neighborhoods were Black-on-Black crimes. Rising crime rates in inner city areas—often related to violent crack cocaine market transactions—helped to usher in a thinly veiled “war on drugs” often interpreted as a “war on Black communities.” The economic interplay between race and crime could no longer be ignored.

The special edition of the Review of Black Political Economy revisited what economists and like-minded scholars had to say in the early 20th century about race and crime. ¹ The volume also brought together some exciting new work among economists who were exploring connections between the economy and crime. Some of this work placed race at its center. Some made race intentional in the analysis. The original introduction highlights the fact that there was a tension—observed in the early 20th century and again in the 1980s—between asking why are Blacks so criminal? And asking why is the criminal justice system so Black? The papers in the seminal 1987 volume of the Review of Black Political Economy exposed this tension within the economics profession.

Labor Economists Richard Freeman (1987) and Had Phillips and Harold Votey (1987) explored what then seemed the most logical link between race and economics of crime: the nexus between labor market opportunities and criminal activities. At the time, the thrust in the direction of examining illegal activities in the context of labor markets was novel and policy relevant. Economists who conventionally studied racial differences in unemployment, labor force participation, and earnings recognized an empirical association between crime and employment opportunities. As co-editors of the 1987 special volume of the Review of Black Political Economy on the economics of race and crime, Simms and I were delighted to expose to a broader audience the innovative research that emerged from a series of panels we had organized at the Allied Social Sciences Association, National Economic Association meetings, and other national venues.

Some of the papers in the 1987 volume pointed to a more eclectic approach to examining criminal justice systems, labor markets, and racial disparities. Myers and Sabol (1987), building on research by 1930s pioneers Ruse and Kirchheimer, explored not only the individualistic impacts of labor market opportunities on criminal choices but the institutionalized and structural functions of imprisonment and incarceration across the business cycle. The perceptive commentary by Richard McGahey (1987) helped to cement the importance of moving away from the rational choice models of crime to understanding structural impediments that exist in both labor markets and in the criminal justice system that produce the observed associations between race and crime.

It is worth noting that impediments within the economics profession itself prevented much of the innovative work published in the 1987 volume from being exposed to a broader audience. Based on an established algorithm, the Journal of Economic Literature for much of the era failed to catalog the Review of Black Political Economy, and researchers eager to discover new frontiers exploring connections between the economics of race and the economics of crime would for many years thereafter not be able to retrieve papers such as those published in the special edition using scholarly economics search tools, particularly electronic search engines such as EconLit. As Ekwurzel (1995) explains in a review of the history of indexing of economics articles by the American Economic Association, the transition from paper volumes to the modern era of digital reproduction of scholarly works was cumbersome and left much to be desired.

Despite the lack of exposure to many of the articles in the 1987 special edition of the Review of Black Political Economy on the economics of race and crime, there has been a notable explosion of publications in top economics journals exploring various aspects of the connection between race and crime since that time. These articles can be classified into four streams of thought. The first includes papers that examine racial profiling in police stops. These articles largely stem from litigation where statisticians and econometricians were hired by plaintiffs and defendants in high-profile cases involving allegations of racial bias by state highway patrol agencies. The enormous troves of data accumulated in these cases provided the basis for publishable papers in a wide range of economics, law, and public policy journals. Myers (2002) highlights the fact that economists primarily focus on the efficiency aspects of racial profiling.

The second stream of research published in flagship journals of the American Economic Association and other outlets makes use of newly available experimental data on the assignment of judges to explore a range of topics related to racial disparities in bail setting, pre-trial detention, and sentencing (Dobbie et al., 2018). Many of the papers in this stream of research only incidentally examine race as a factor, commenting on it only due to the overrepresentation of African Americans among those in the criminal justice system. The third stream of research, ignored mainly in previous years due to a lack of credible data, involves the analysis of the racial disparities in deadly police encounters. Following explosive riots and civil disorders in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, and highly publicized police shootings of Black males, economists have been grappling with understanding whether, in fact, there are racial disparities in the first point of contact within the criminal justice system, often using the lens of efficiency analysis. Polarizing findings include papers by Fryer (2016) and Cunningham and Gillezeau (2018). A fourth stream contains papers that examine the ultimate impacts of crime and incarceration on other social and behavioral outcomes such as family structure, employment, or effects on children (Craigie et al., 2018). These papers, again, often incidentally mention race in that Blacks are overrepresented among those in the criminal justice system.

Mostly missing from the mainstream economics literature are articles that focus on racism in the criminal justice system as opposed to racial disparities or racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, a criticism we raised in our 1987 compilation of readings. The omission of the study of racism compounds the dilemma of conventional economic publications that fail to incorporate or detail empirical measurements of institutional or systemic factors that explain racial disparities in law enforcement in deference to an examination of the underlying individual behaviors of criminals or law enforcement officials.

In many respects, the prescriptions we offered in 1987 for the future of research on the economics of race and crime remain as valid today as they did in 1987. Modeling must move away from the simplistic individual choice framework common within the neoclassical tradition and begin to explore in more detail the structural or institutional forces that permeate both the criminal justice system and engagement of African Americans in labor markets, capital markets, residential markets, and other aspects of the economy. The microlevel of the analysis of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system must be supplemented by careful historical and institutional analyses of the systemic and structural determination of observed inequalities.

One of the few economics journals in the world that explicitly advances the analysis of systemic racism and structural components of racial inequality is the Review of Black Political Economy. Readers who would like to peruse the works previously published in 1987 can do so through a virtual volume [https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/toc/rbp/16/1-2].